Debate of paying athletes continues

One of the greatest traditions in all of college football is the College GameDay poster. ESPN’s classic traveling Saturday preview show at whatever campus is deemed host to the biggest game that week always inspires fans to get creative in their attempts to land on TV. Whether it’s the Ole Miss fan proclaiming “Nick Saban Skips Leg Day” or the Michigan State fan noting “Even Gandhi Hated Ohio State,” some of the most creative signs always go viral.

The best sign from this weekend’s show before the Ohio State vs. Wisconsin game in Madison wasn’t from a rowdy fan, though. Instead it came from Nigel Hayes, the star player on Wisconsin’s men’s basketball team. In bright red, all-caps, Hayes’ sign read “Broke College Athlete Anything Helps.” At the bottom, he included the name of a Venmo account, in hopes of soliciting donations.

Of course, Hayes meant for the sign to be ironic, and he later said that he would be donating any money sent to the listed electronic banking account to a local Boys and Girls Club, not keeping any of it. He’s not actually broke. He was simply taking the opportunity to voice his opinion on the issue of athlete compensation in college sports. It’s an issue that’s more complicated than it might seem on the surface, but nonetheless deserves a much better answer than what currently stands under the status quo.

Hayes makes an interesting spokesperson for the issue. While he is maybe not the most in need of any immediate compensation for the value he adds to his athletic department, he is one of the most deserving based on the actual value he brings.

Hayes, a senior, considered entering the NBA draft last year and was projected to fall somewhere in the second round. He likely wouldn’t have jumped right into a multi-million dollar contract and signing bonus with an NBA team, but very easily could have been making an actual salary playing basketball either in the NBA’s developmental league or in a European professional league. He instead turned it down, opting for another year of exposure and development with a top college program — plus the ability to finish his degree, something he expressed as a key factor — before attempting to take his talents to the NBA.

In other words, Hayes clearly finds a lot of value in the scholarship awarded to him by Wisconsin. But given his status as one of the best players in the country, he almost certainly brings way more value to the table within the Wisconsin athletic department.

According to a University of South Florida study, the marginal annual revenue brought to a school by the average five-star basketball recruit is $625,000. For a four-star recruit, it’s $178,000. And that’s only factoring how the improved competitiveness of the given team allows the school to sell more tickets and attract more viewers on TV. It doesn’t even project the long-term increase in financial donations to a university from having a proud and competitive athletic program.

These numbers are so high because of the new TV contracts conferences are signing. The Big Ten conference as a whole sold its broadcast rights of football and basketball games for $440 million a year as of next year, meaning Wisconsin will get about $44 million a year directly from those broadcasts.

The tuition that Wisconsin, a public university, covers for Hayes, an out-of-state student, is worth about $47,000 a year.

The disparity between what football and basketball players generate and what they receive in return are staggering. It certainly begs the question of why the NCAA requires these players to maintain an amateur status, only to be compensated by their scholarship and benefits rather than any sort of wage or salary.

The answer has to do with where all that money goes. A lot of it goes to athletic directors, head coaches, new facilities and other staff members of the football and basketball programs. But contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t all go there.

In fact, a huge percentage of it goes toward funding the non-revenue generating sports. This includes essentially every men’s sport besides football and basketball and every single women’s sport.

In a lot of cases, the expenditures of non-revenue sports leave certain athletic programs with a deficit over a given year. For example, eight of the 10 public Pac-12 schools had program deficits in 2014, despite generating millions in revenue from their football programs. Even Florida State, the defending national champions in football in 2014, spent more money on athletics than it generated in revenue that year. 

Another interesting note is that for some of the biggest and most successful sports programs that do come out in the black during a given year, some of the revenue actually goes back into the overall university budget. Wisconsin, for example, will spend more than $100 million on its athletic program in a given year, but it generated enough revenue to give $11.5 million in revenue back to the school after covering all its expenses last year. Yes, Badgers head coach Paul Chryst already makes a seven-figure salary, but the revenue he and his program generate doesn’t go straight into his and his staff’s holiday bonuses.

So the real question is not whether universities have the money to pay athletes. They do. It’s whether paying athletes is really in the best interest of all student athletes and the school as a whole.

If every scholarship athlete in a Power Five conference participated in something like a work study program, they would start earning an hourly wage for any work they put in for their team. It would be a very significant additional expenditure for the department as a whole. It makes sense for football and basketball, but it makes much less sense for the non-revenue generating sports. The result would likely be fewer scholarship opportunities and even a reduction in the number of programs that schools can offer.

A complete free market disruption of college athletics, where Heisman-winning quarterbacks are signed to actual contracts worth as much as their head coaches, would also probably result in fewer schools offering full scholarships to backup lineman or journeyman special team players. Either way, someone besides university administrators and Nick Saban would see reductions in the benefits they receive from participating.

There will likely be a big shift in the direction of athletes’ compensation in the near future, as the tides are certainly turning. But it’s ultimately an issue too complicated to resolve in a newspaper column, and especially on a College GameDay poster.     

Luke Holthouse is a senior majoring in policy, planning and development and print and digital journalism. His column, “Holthouse Party,” runs on Wednesday.